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Hi GALEON WCS collaborators, If we are going to have a specific proposal in place for a netCDF encoding profile for WCS by the time of the June OGC Technical Committee meeting, we have to come to some agreement soon on what that proposed profile will be. Currently, for the netCDF encoding profile, we have three draft documents which serve somewhat different purposes. 1. A brief outline document with pointers to external information sources. The main headings in http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/GALEON/netCDFprofile-short.htm are seen to be the important ones. 2. In addtion, there is a need for at least one document that provides people with overview information regarding the relationship between the OGC WCS specification and the encoding profile format. In the case of netCDF, there is a draft (by committee but a very good committee) of such a document at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/GALEON/WCSnetCDFencoding.htm This version is fairly informal and only a few pages long which was one of our original goals. 3. A third more formally crafted, detailed delineation of the mapping between the ISO data model and the CF-netCDF data model was written by Stefano Nativi and Lorenzo Bigagli. http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/GALEON/Stefano-netCDF_profile_for_WCS_3.doc Part of my concern is that, if we are going to replace the WCS list of 5 encoding formats with a requirement for document a proposed encoding format, what we do for netCDF will set a precedent for WCS encoding format documentation requirements. To start the discussion, I'll say that my sense right now is that each of these three documents is needed for a proposed new encoding format. It is important to have pointers to information specific to the encoding format, another document of 3-5 pages in length that provides an overview of the relationships between the encoding format and WCS, and finally a detailed mapping between the data models, complete with UML diagrams. Perhaps the latter two could be combined into one. But it will be crucial to get input from others -- especially from those involved in trying to create WCS clients and servers that handle various encodings. What's the minimum amount of information you need for the implementation? What would be a more complete set of information? Are there glaring omissions from the drafts we've put together for the netCDF profile documentation? How can the documents be kept concise without omitting important materials? The GALEON Phase 1 experience hopefully provided some hands on experience for some of you trying to implement WCS for netCDF. Would this information have gotten the job done more quickly. Some of you are thinking about similar documents for other encoding format profiles. Will these drafts be a reasonable template? If we are to propose something formally at the June TC, we have to submit the proposal 3 weeks in advance. That means we have to have the proposal finalized by the beginning of June. I will be out of the office at conferences for most of the rest of this month, but I should be in email contact most of the time. I suggest we keep the galeon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx list involved in the discussion because there still interested people in that forum who are not yet members of OGC. Have at it. -- Ben PS I was hoping to have this set up so we could carry on the discussion in the context of the GALEON OGCnetwork, but I'm just not comfortable that we could all spin up on that approach in time to get this done.
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